At this South Baltimore warehouse, memories are more valuable than developers' money

Gene Smoot doesn’t have to look far to see how much potential there is in his family’s 158,000-square-foot warehouse at 1901 Light St.

Just next door, PMC Properties Inc. developed what the company considers its best asset in Baltimore, a 180-unit apartment building that was home to the National Enameling & Stamping Co. A block away, Chesapeake Realty Partners has leased up its 1901 S. Charles St. apartment project and has another building on Wells Street under construction.

Smoot has received offers, but when he looks around the warehouse and the first-floor offices of his family’s Guardian Services Group Ltd.’s oldest property, it’s difficult to think about giving up the keys. The offices are lined with portraits of family members and every corner seems to hold a memory. Smoot's family has used the building since 1952 and acquired it in 1980.

“It’s almost impossible to walk away,” Smoot said after a tour of the warehouse, which stores the belongings of U.S. troops stationed overseas under a Department of Defense contract. “I don’t know if I could sell it and bear to drive by. Every death, every birth of someone in the family — we knew where in the warehouse we were when we got the news.”

But Smoot is a pragmatist. He knows he can easily move the operations of the company somewhere else — the company has leased warehouses in eastern Baltimore County and Odenton to support operations — and that there is high demand given the neighborhood’s rise.

So Smoot is considering a new future for the building — but, for now, only through a joint venture. It’s an approach that carries the risk that the economics may not work out, or the price may not be right for a prospective developer. But it’s the only way Smoot envisions turning the 1880s-era warehouse into anything else.

“I’m 66 years old and I’m smart enough to know it’s the right thing to do for our kids and grandchildren,” Smoot said. “It’s not about the money. It’s about comfort and integrity with the partner.”

Steven Bloom, a partner at PMC, said Smoot’s building was so attractive that the project at 101 Wells St. was designed to eventually incorporate the subdivided Smoot property. But despite numerous offers, Bloom said he’s been unable to convince Smoot to let it go.

“We would absolutely love to buy the building,” Bloom said. “If you look at what we did and cleaned everything up, if we had that building it would really pop and you would see it when you came down Wells."

But PMC does not typically enter joint venture partnerships, Bloom said. And when it comes to price, “unfortunately there’s a disconnect between what the buyer wants to pay and what the seller wants to get.”

A conversion of the building could support about 100 apartments and has tall ceilings that would probably make for nice “lofty, factory units” typically larger than the office conversions PMC has done, Bloom said.

But for Smoot, it’s just too hard to walk away.

“It’s like another parent — this has been part of our lives since I was seven years old,” Smoot said. “We want a strong, fair, equitable agreement. And we want to keep it in the family.”